The editors of the forthcoming Collected Works of Edmund Spenser, Patrick Cheney, Elizabeth Fowler, Joseph Loewenstein, David Miller, and Andrew Zurcher, are happy to report that their work is progressing smoothly on both the print and digital components of their edition. Oxford University Press will publish Spenser’s collected works in a six-volume print edition, re-edited from the earliest extant sources in print and manuscript. The editors are also constructing a digital Archive of Spenser’s texts, richly marked up to enable readers to examine features of these texts in ways not possible in a print edition. The Archive will also contain scans of original editions; the editors plan for it to serve as the first complete repository of all the variant states of Spenser’s texts.

Work on the first volume of the print edition, which will contain The Shepheardes Calender, Spenser’s correspondence with Gabriel Harvey, including Harvey’s letters, as well as Spenser’s verse translations and selections of the surrounding text from Jan van der Noot’s Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings, is nearly complete. The editors are in the final stages of writing and editing their commentary, textual, and editorial introductions on these texts—Loewenstein on the Theatre and Spenser-Harvey letters, and Cheney on The Shepheardes Calender—while the textual work is finished or nearly finished for all three texts. The editors hope to send the texts and the editorial material for Volume 1 of the print edition to OUP by May 2013. Indeed, the editors are on track to complete the textual work for all of the printed texts in the edition, a significant milestone for the project, by early 2014.

Along with the print edition, the editors and the technical team at Washington University have made significant progress on the digital Archive. The editors are consulting with EEBO and OUP concerning a limited public release of the Archive, which now contains text and commentary for all of the texts in the first volume of the print edition, as well as the text of the 1590 Faerie Queene. Unlike the print edition, however, the texts on the Archive can be tailored to meet a range of different reading experiences and scholarly interests. Toggles on the browser display allow the reader to modernize or unmodernize the text, display or hide commentary, and highlight, if desired, places where variations occur in the text. The web display also includes links to corresponding scans of the control text. And in this sense, the Archive will make the editorial decisions behind the final copy text transparent, a feature especially important because the editors have chosen to assemble an eclectic copy text for all the works first published in print: they are basing the edited text on corrected formes selected from the full range of witnesses, rather than using a single physical witness as the control text. In its final state, the Archive will publish scans of formes in all variant states, along with, for each text, a page devoted to forme-state analysis; there, a text’s variants will be organized according to the forme on which they appear, and individual variants will be sorted into corresponding states based on the order in which the editors believe that the changes were made. The editors hope customizable features like these will make the Archive an attractive place to study Spenser’s work for a wide range of readers: for Spenser scholars, the Archive will serve as a uniquely rich source of textual information, and for the beginning student of Spenser, an aid in the appreciation of his work.

Lauren Robertson

Washington University in St. Louis